From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sun Jul 07 2002 - 01:44:56 MDT
On Sat, Jul 06, 2002 at 09:21:49PM -0700, Olga Bourlin wrote:
> From: "Anders Sandberg" <asa@nada.kth.se>
>
> > rational selfish actors can form non-coercive societies. The problem is
> > the lack of rationality, which causes people to choose suboptimal
> > selfish solutions ("greed"), and to some extent irrational behavior
> > causing people to pursue inconsistent subgoals that disrupt their
> > supergoals. One approach would be to find ways to diminish these
> > factors, which is likely hard but can be quite transhumanistically
> > rewarding, another would be to study what institutions and rule-sets can
> > buffer such factors with a minimum of coercion.
>
> Agree that most humans lack rationality - in fact, our most "advanced" and
> civilized cultures lack rationality. But beyond the problem of finding what
> is "rational," how are we going to administer that rationality? By
> injecting it? Lacing it in chocolate bars? Electro-shock therapy?
Hmm, did you really read the above paragraph? I asked how such
institutions could be created with a minimum of coercion, and you
immediately suggest chemicals in chocolate and ECT. Don't take this
wrong, but they seem to be quite a bit coercive.
Besides, any political scheme based on somehow remaking people to
fit the scheme is 1) bound to fail and 2) bound to hurt a lot of
people in the process. So my suggestion was to instead of trying to
get super-rational people we should look at what institutions and
systems can work well with the usual mix of less-than-rational
people. No assumptions that the leaders are smarter or better than
the rest, no assumptions that people are alike.
The standard libertarian example of an institution that helps
less-than-rational people to become more rational in effect is the
free market, where price information is a kind of rational estimate
that emerges from many actors. Even if disregard the rationality
part, it is an interesting distributed resource allocation system.
But what other examples are there?
> Okay, I'm out of my political box for the moment. I would love to get the
> latest recipe for Rational Gingerbread Men.
I'm certain the recipe doesn't contain any additives in the
chocolate :-)
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